Indiana hails from New Hampshire, and his contributions to the art world, both as artist and critic, are most often associated with New York, where he moved in 1978: putting on plays in the East Village, exhibiting photographs, and working as chief art critic at the Village Voice in the 1980s, a tenure he fictionalized in his debut novel, Horse Crazy (1989), a haunting Death in Venice for the AIDS era. But before living in Manhattan, Indiana—who changed his last name from Hoisington in a spell of “immense naïveté,” he told the New York Observer’s M.H. Miller in 2014—spent years in California, first as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the midst of the antiwar movement, and later in Los Angeles. It is from the perspective of an ex-Californian New Yorker not unlike Indiana himself—Seth, a marginally successful gay magazine writer who checks into the Chateau Marmont on a Condé Nast assignment to profile “a famous movie star who’s recently gone out on a limb, in the words of the movie star’s publicist, by appearing as a homosexual with AIDS in a television drama about AIDS”—that the reader is introduced to Indiana’s Los Angeles in Resentment (1997), the first in a trilogy of crime novels that are currently being reissued by Semiotext(e)’s Native Agents imprint. All three novels are literary remediations—or as Indiana calls them, “pastiches”—of high-profile crime dramas first broadcast on Court TV and the nightly news: in Resentment, Lyle and Erik Menendez, who were sentenced to life without parole for the 1989 murder of their parents, are reimagined as Carlos and Felix Martinez; in Three Month Fever, Cunanan becomes the emotional core of the Versace murder; and in 2001’s Depraved Indifference, murderer, grifter, and modern-day slaver Sante Kimes appears as Evangeline Slote, an always-drunk Liz Taylor deadringer known in the guestbooks of roadside motels from Las Vegas to Sacramento as “Evelyn Carson” and “Eva Annamapu,” among other pseudonyms, any one of which may in fact be her legal name.
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